First Chapter

'Wealth and Democracy'

Published: May 12, 2002

(Page 2 of 3)

How this duality evolved during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries provides an essential backdrop to the circumstances of the twenty-first. And our saga can begin, fittingly, amid the distrust and suspicion rife in Philadelphia during the famous July of 1776, mere blocks from the very birth chambers of the new nation, where hot and tired delegates were just putting the finishing touches on the Declaration of Independence.

Many of the declaration's signers were representatives of America's richest families&#151;a Massachusetts Hancock, a New York Livingston, a Carroll of Maryland, a Lee of Virginia, and a South Carolina Rutledge. Theirs was a revolutionary document with respect to Britain, but not in matters domestic. King George III might be charged with repeated injuries, usurpations, and tyrannies and with sending a swarm of officers to harass Americans and &quot;eat out their substance,&quot; but not even Jefferson thought to condemn him for setting the rich above the poor. Hierarchy was a fact of life in the eighteenth-century American colonies.

And so only a few hundred yards from Carpenters' Hall, where the declaration's signers met, disgruntled artisans, storekeepers, and militiamen could be found plotting their own cause in small, sparsely furnished homes and unfashionable taverns like the Four Alls on Sixth Street or the Wilkes and Liberty on Arch Street. Pennsylvania's July 8 selection of delegates to its state constitutional convention was just days away, and they aimed to be in control.

Only supporters of independence were allowed to vote, Tories being barred, and with prewar property requirements also set aside, radicals dominated. Part of what goaded those who were about to give Pennsylvania a state constitution was the increasing concentration of Philadelphia wealth and power among a small capital city elite. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, middling artisans claimed 17 percent of Philadelphia's recorded wealth. By 1720 this had dropped to 12 percent and in the decade before the Revolution to just 5 percent. During the same period the assets of the most prosperous 4 percent of Philadelphians jumped from 25 percent of the citywide total to 56 percent, luxury proclaiming itself in everything from new mansions and expensive carriages to glittering dinner parties.

The radical architects of the new state constitution took indirect aim at these disparities by expanding the franchise, limiting the terms of state legislators, and opening sessions to the public. They even specified that final passage of bills should be delayed until their contents could be published in the state's newspapers and debated by the general public. But in the Declaration of Rights attached to the Constitution, they were more direct, declaring that government existed for the &quot;Common Benefit, Protection and Security of the People, Nation or Community, and not for the particular Emolument or advantage of any Single man, family or Set of Men, who are only part of that community.&quot; This was bold talk for the eighteenth century, and many delegates had supported an even stronger Sixteenth Article, narrowly rejected, which stated that &quot;an Enormous Proportion of Property vested in a few Individuals is dangerous to the Rights, and Destructive of the Common Happiness of Mankind; and therefore, every free State hath a right by its Laws to discourage the Possession of Such Property.&quot;

These complaints had an element of prophecy. Similar resentments have burst forth at frequent intervals in U.S. history. And if grumbles about economic unfairness are not quite as American as the Fourth of July, one may suggest that they are as American as the eighth of July, the day Pennsylvania activists chose their radical constitutionmakers. We will see these angers in clash after clash, sometimes as a bold banner, sometimes as a subtext of unrelieved frustration.

It would be a mistake, though, to imply that such confrontations were a staple of prerevolutionary America. They were not. The British North American colonies, outside New England, being ethnically and religiously mixed, had more of these kinds of disagreements. What scholars now call class tensions might throb in New York's feudal landed estates along the Hudson, Philadelphia's artisan precincts, or in the North Carolina backcountry, where an insurgency against the corrupt impositions of the royal governor and the tidewater gentry was bloodily crushed in 1771 at the Battle of the Alamance. But for the most part, once the Revolution broke out, economic disagreements were generally subordinated to the larger struggle against Britain. Patriots agreed on an external target: far-off imperial wealth and power.

Within the empire of 1775-76, the center of hauteur and wealth was in England itself, among the royal family and the landed aristocracy, with an addendum among planters from the rich sugar islands of the West Indies. King George III, sighting a particularly ornate coach one day, exclaimed, &quot;Sugar, sugar. Eh! All that sugar.&quot; There were also some &quot;nabobs&quot; enriched by India, like Robert Clive, who had made away with half of the coin and jewels of greater Bengal. The hundred or so great landowners of England predominated, although their estates, being entailed to pass automatically to one heir, were never really measured. Estimates from rent rolls suggest that the lands of the richest, the dukes of Bedford and Sutherland, the earl of Derby, and the Grosvenors (soon-to-be dukes of Westminster) could have been worth as much as 5 million poundseach. The half-dozen largest nonlanded British fortunes, by contrast, were in the 600,000 to 1 million pound range, which by the late 1780s would be some three to five million new American dollars.